Gallery: Josh Barker, front, a fifth grader who loves to play, and is the only child remaining who lived on the block when 3-year-old Terrell Mayes was shot, plays with neighbor Jacob Van Sickle, left.

David Joles – Star Tribune

Gallery: Josh Barker sits on the steps outside his family's home with blue-nose pit bull, Diamond.

David Joles – Star Tribune

Gallery: Shirley Smith, a resident of Colfax for about 45 years, who was married to the late bluesman Big Walter Smith, has also watched neighbors come and go. "I'm a North Side girl," Smith said. "I can't imagine living anywhere else."

David Joles – Star Tribune

Gallery: Schoolchildren from Cityview Community School rode their bikes through the neighborhood in June.

David Joles – Star Tribune

Gallery: "Oh, baby, this is sweet compared to Chicago," said Patricia Davis, left, who grew up there. She moved to the block two years ago. Her nephew Tray Merritt, right, also moved to north Minneapolis from Chicago and believes it is quieter, safer here.

David Joles – Star Tribune

Gallery: George Bazoff, now in his 70s, has lived on the block since the early 1990s and was its block captain, trying to enforce standards. But he's long been troubled by the changes he's seen, and blames renters who have moved in.

David Joles – Star Tribune

Gallery: Marsha Mayes, the mother of 3-year-old Terrell Mayes, stand outside her former home where Terrell was killed in a drive-by shooting when a bullet pierced the blue, vinyl-sided rental, fatally striking Terrell in 2012.

David Joles – Star Tribune

Gallery: To the outside world, hers is the house where Terrell Mayes died, the reason that there are plastic flowers at the base of its north wall that are brought by his mother under the hole made by the bullet that felled him. But to Lyssa Overton, her daughter and two grandchildren, the shabby blue four-bedroom is a refuge, it is home. Overton experienced anguish when she had to clean Terrell's finger prints off the kitchen window, left, when her family first moved in.